Celebrating National Coach Week – and a Fond Farewell to NCSD
It’s National Coach Week, and it also marks the final week of us running the National Coach Services Database (NCSD). Having supported the coach industry since 2012 — the year of the London Olympics — we’ve seen it evolve dramatically. We have fond memories of manually creating ATCO CIF files in Notepad to keep pace with an ever-changing landscape of coach data!
Since then, we’ve completed over 650 weekly builds, processing millions of coach trips into digital formats used by thousands across the UK. In recent months, the data has been dual-running alongside the Department for Transport’s Bus Open Data Service (BODS). For those wishing to continue accessing coach data, it is now available here:
https://data.bus-data.dft.gov.uk/coach/download
To mark the end of an era, we thought it fitting to share a few parting stats.
Weekly Coach Activity Across Great Britain
This week alone, over 20,000 coach journeys are scheduled, operated across 187 unique services. With coaches typically offering between 28 and 87 seats, this means that each week there are between 560,000 and 1.74 million seats available — a staggering number! This doesn’t even include private hires, event-specific services, or international routes.
Operator Highlights
- National Express remains the largest operator, running just over 55% of all scheduled coach services in Great Britain.
- Longest route? That honour goes to FlixBus’s N11 service, which averages 792.5 minutes (just over 13 hours) per journey. Here’s the route map, generated in our TRACC software:
- Most frequent service? That goes to Scottish Citylink’s 900 service, running between Glasgow and Edinburgh. It operates an incredible 840 times a week, with up to four coaches running simultaneously, and an average journey time of 82.6 minutes.
- A close second is the A8 coach between Stansted Airport and London, with over 650 weekly trips, underscoring the key role of coaches in airport connectivity.
Coach Connectivity Across the UK
Coaches play a vital role in national connectivity. Using our TRACC software, we analysed travel times between every coach stop in Great Britain, looking specifically at access to the UK’s three capital cities:
London
- Reachable from 402 coach stops within 4 hours
- Reachable from 516 stops within 6 hours
Cardiff
- Reachable from 203 coach stops within 4 hours
- Reachable from 380 stops within 6 hours
Edinburgh
- Reachable from 519 coach stops within 4 hours
- Reachable from 662 stops within 6 hours
It’s worth noting that the definition of "coach service" can vary between England and Scotland — which is reflected in the density of stops seen on the Scottish map.
As we say goodbye to NCSD, we’d like to thank everyone who has used and supported the service over the past 14 years. It’s been a pleasure helping to digitally connect the coach network — one route at a time.